Tommy and Michelle in China

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

On an unassuming Friday, Thomas and I were just getting
ready to meet up with our co-workers for a relaxing Friday night dinner. As we
walked to our door, I spotted something that stole my breath away. A flood,
emerging rapidly beneath our door.

Ripping the
door open, I found that the hallway outside our apartment was entirely flooded
in about a half inch of water. Shouting a battle cry back to Tommy, I took off
towards the stairwell from whose door the water was gushing. I wrenched the
door open.

As I crept
cautiously up the stairs, my mind flashed with visions of a burst water pipe,
an overflowing sink or shower. I turned the corner onto the seventeenth floor.
The water continued to seep down from the next floor. I stepped past the stream
of water up towards the eighteenth floor.

“Ni hao!” I
called into the void of darkness and water, anger lacing my heavily accented
words.

Abruptly a paper
thin maintenance worker peered around the corner at me. His eyes widened in
disbelief as I gestured angrily towards the water surrounding my sneakers.

“Zai nali?”
I demanded in my poor attempt to ask where the water was coming from, jabbing
at the water, then proceeding to stomp in it as I ascended toward him.

He spoke
rapidly to someone out of my sight. As I crested the landing, I turned to see a
female worker on the nineteenth floor holding a white house. I gaped. It was
worse than I could have ever imagined.

There was
no busted pipe, there was no overflowing sink. There was only the hose and the
stairs. These two people were washing the stairs. Washing the concrete stairs
by flooding them. The apparent logic being the water would somehow roll its way
down nineteen flights of stairs to the basement.

I waved
desperately for the man to follow me. He did. Down the increasingly flood
stairs to where all of that water was pouring out directly into our hallway and
from there directly under the door of our apartment.

Tommy was
earnestly attempting to push the water out with a mop as it soaked into our fake
wood floors. The frail maintenance worker looked in shock about him at the thoroughly
flooded sixteenth floor. Tommy and I angrily gestured around us at the wrecked
hallway and entry way to our apartment.

The fail
man disappeared back up the stairs and reappeared shortly after with a broom.
He used the broom to push the water from the hallway back into the stairwell.
Where it went from there is anyone’s guess.

He did not
attempt to help us fix our apartment. Rather, as soon as some of the water was
gone from the hallway, he disappeared. And thus, the China Hydro Engineer
became our arch nemesis.